Now that everyone is talking about Armored Core again I can (sort of) gush about one of my favorite storytelling flourishes from the original game!
In the early Armored core titles resource management is arguably more important than the actual combat. When returning from a mission you will be charged for Fuel, Repairs, and Ammunition. More than once you'll barely survive an encounter, only to find that you've lost more money than you made from the mission, and as a result.. you can fall into debt.
For new players this can quickly lead to a debt spiral, and when you reach -50,000 credits a fascinating thing happens. Your pilot is dragged away to a facility and sold into the Human PLUS programme.
"You will be reborn in this experiment.. if you live"
Now from a game design perspective this is a pretty cut and dry pity system. The current run is unsalvagable so you're handed a permanent stat boost and have all your debt wiped, restarting in a New Game+ fashion.
But from a story perspective this is allot more sinister...
Throughout AC small hints are dropped that your mercenary company may not be quite above board, and that the highest ranked pilots have almost superhuman levels of skill. It is likely these pilots were also put through the program, and slowly assimilated into the war-machine that fuels the Armored Core Universe.
The last little touch is having your pilots name automatically changed to "Rebel" with a random three-digit number, you're just an asset, meshed into their machine blindly following orders.
Who would have thought this Mech Combat game would have also contained a transhuminist nightmare 💜